I’ve been feeling self-conscious lately, and I need to ask someone. I’m nearing 17, and I’ve never dated, never kissed, the most I’ve done is hold hands with a girl I had a crush on as a kid. I’m going to college this fall and I feel unprepared for it, and trying to date in general. I’ve isolated myself for so long, that I don’t know what it means to be in a healthy relationship anymore. I’m worried that I”ll end up isolating myself again, and that I won’t be able to get anywhere in life.
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If you think this generally, it just goes to follow that you’ll feel overwhelmed.
Of course you feel unprepared for college. how prepared could you be? You’ve never experienced it. It’s this thing we do in our culture, stressing out about how you know you’re reading for something you’ve never done.
Why dating and college in the same sentence? I suggest doing your best to enjoy your summer, go to college and get the lay of the land, focus on making college work for you. Try not to get overwhelmed with healthy relationship cogitating while you’re trying to establish a routine.
Be a great student first. A love will find you whether it’s in the lunch hall or in the library. Keep your head up, eyes open when moving around campus.
Also, accept invitations to do stuff. Just remember to schedule your social activities after homework, study times. Perhaps there’ll be less of those until you figure out your schedule and its flow.
Your opportunities will grow being at round different folks. Hopefully, you don’t have an ideal mate in mind as that limits your options. The more, the better, right? Dating can be tricky. Stay loose with it.
Quality is better than quantity in the end. You should adventure the different quantities, though. It’s part of the learning experience.
Good luck! 🙌🏽❤️🙌🏼
One of the things that helps ground me is to remember that everyone else in life is trying to figure it out too and is just as confused and scared as I am (maybe more).
This is especially true in college. Everyone is thrown into that unfamiliar environment, separated from the comfortable familiarity of family, friends and home.
My advice to you is to recognize that and be open to other people and new experiences. College is an amazing time for learning, exploring and friendships.
To this day, most of my most deep and strong friendships are with my college roommates.
I just had an excuse to fly to Asia for work and met up with one of them. More than 20 years later it was like yesterday.
Your love life will happen when you have your life in order. Work on that and be patient. I met the love of my life in my early 40’s after previously settling for less and then getting divorced. 2nd time around for both of us, we both knew ourselves better and also what we wanted.
She is my best friend and my love.
Focus on meeting a variety of people and making friends. Your dorm, your classes, and extracurricular activities will help you meet people. Just don’t isolate. It’ll be okay.
Focus on beimg a good student, meeting new people, and trying new things. Don’t worry about dating, even for a second. I was quite shy and never went on dates in high school. In college, I kept good grades, was very active and took on lleadership roles in multiple organizations, played some intramural sports (I even learned to skate and played intramural ice hockey). I got to know hundreds of people and got comfortable talking with people I didn’t know. Along the way I discovered that many women found me attractive and wanted to date me. Maybe because I was so comfortable around them and treated them as human beings, not as objects of desire.
Although it may not seem like it, a lot of people don’t have much experience dating in high school. So you are in good company. There will be a lot of people starting their freshman year of college with the same lack of experience that you have and trying to figure it out as they go.
My advice follows a lot of the other advice here, which is to focus on being a good student, meeting people, and making friends. Get involved with clubs and activities, with study groups, with the social activities going on in your dorm – all that good stuff. In that process, you will probably find people you want to date and who want to date you. I wouldn’t make trying to find dates as a priority though. Let it happen naturally when it does.
You’re putting a lot of pressure on yourself. You have this idea of where you “should” be. Stop that nonsense bc this is your life and your own personal path will unfold. If making out and high school parties didn’t happen for you, that’s okay! When we are young we really have the bad habit to d comparing ourselves to our peers to decide which f we are okay. This is not a race. It just a your life and there is divine timing to things. Have faith that those things will come. Just focus on yourself and school. A smart person sexy AF!
Honestly man don’t stress it. Focus on your classes, make friends, hang out with people, stuff will happen eventually. If someone interesting comes along, great! But don’t stress it. Also don’t worry, most people your age are not experienced with dating as let’s be frank you’re only a teen for only a few years and that’s not much time to do a whole lot, not to mention nobody knows who they are as a person at that time and folks tend to lack the maturity for things to get legit serious. So, you’ll be in good company.
I drop a personal trick for you though. In university, I regularly cooked food for house parties. I’ve always been huge into cooking and if you make good food people want you around to cook. I got a few girlfriends by cooking at parties alone. There’s often a girl who gets invited but she doesn’t really know most of the people there, so she’s by herself, typically in the kitchen where food and refreshments are. That was always an opportunity to introduce myself, ask her major, etc and ask if she would like to help me prep. Also brings opportunities to flirt especially if she’s not experienced preparing food. If you don’t know how to cook, start now. You’ll get the hang of it.
Hey, depending on the size of your freshman class, you’re going to be tossed in with a couple of thousand other kids who used to be the cool kids, or the nerds, or the jocks of their high school and now you are all the little fish. It’ll be a good time to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get out to all the freshman orientation activities and mixers and make a new set of friends, guys and gals.